Christmas Now

It is hard to believe how fast Christmas comes around these days. When I was a child, it was 10 years from one Christmas to the next, or at least if felt like it in my perception. Now it comes every 3 months in ripe adulthood. I do my best to make it last. I have the same idea as the local retailers –start in October and keep on ‘til January. That is the only way I have enough time to notice it in my busy, overflowing life. Anybody who thinks that we who live in the rural world don’t have a fast paced life has never been here. The living is easy – but only when we can slow down enough to enjoy it. The way we live life comes from the inside out, it is not dictated by geography. Geography is like the stage set, the players determine the dialogue.
It is not the shopping that causes the bustle in my life, it is the socializing. You’d think that people who live in places like rural southwest Alabama would have limited activities available. Again, this is a misconception. We learned two hundred years age that if we were going to have fun, we‘d have to make so. We learned to share the joy of living by entertaining ourselves and each other. It may be a vibration thing, but those of us who love a good party stick together. We have a code of honor that what happens when we get together is never told outside the group. We only talk about it when we look back on it with the other participants and reminisce. It’s not that we do anything illicit or illegal, but we just don’t want everybody knowing all our business. Knowing people’s business is entertainment in itself. It is for those who choose to live vicariously, rather than actually participate. If there’s a good entertainment, I want to attend it, not hear about it secondhand.
Food is a central part of all celebrations here. This is the co9mmon thread that runs through it all. Libations occur at many gatherings, some up front and some on the sly. We recently had a wet/dry vote in our town. I know that even contemplating a place where liquor is not available is unbelievable for most of the world. It is a hold over from the time when we were either too Christian (according to the narrowest interpretation) or too drunk to be responsible. It also has a lot to do with our ancestry. Our Irish and Indian ancestors did not handle liquor very well. The families of the affected thought they could control intake by making it illegal, and theoretically harder to get. Also, it became a control factor for those who didn’t drink and didn’t care to have others do so.
Consequently, drinking went underground as a group social activity. There was this petition in the paper that listed a whole slew of men from one church who said they morally opposed the legal sale of liquor. The whole town enjoyed looking at the list and telling which of those upright men they had shared a drink with. One man said “Old So and So (One of the signers of the declaration of moral temperance) better not come down to my camp looking for a bottle of whiskey anymore.” Consequently, to avoid further sinning on the part of the signing drinkers, we keep our libatiounary entertainments to ourselves.
Drink divides us, food unites us. Each family has its own traditions of what to serve, but there are certain foods to be found on every holiday table. One is dressing. That is a southern term for stuffing, which we in the south do no put in the turkey, but along side it. Even vegetarians know it’s not Christmas or Thanksgiving or maybe even Easter without dressing. We always make it out of cornbread, too. No soggy white bread stuffing will suit us. It also has lots of celery and onions in it. Some people add a bit of bell pepper to flavor up the broth. If we put in sage, it is only a pinch. We don’t like to taste it, rather have it as a subtle underpinning.
We must also have sweet potatoes. They can be mashed with various things in them. They can be topped with a praline/pecan topping (my personal favorite) or have marshmallows on top. My grandmother went through a couple of trendy sweet potato phases. One was orange rind cups with marshmallows on top. That was handy when you used the orange sections in ambrosia. The other was to mash the sweet potatoes, mold them around a marshmallow and then roll in cornflake crumbs and bake the balls.
No holiday table is ever complete without pecan pies and most have the aforementioned ambrosia. It is a dish made with orange sections and fresh grated coconut. Some people add crushed pineapple. It is not as popular now as it once was because for some reason, children no longer eat coconut. It seems to be a generational thing. That also eliminates Japanese fruitcake, once a dessert staple, from many tables, I’ve always wondered if it was invented during WWII when candied fruit was hard to get. It may have been called Japanese fruit cake as a derogatory term. Anyway, now it seems to be as ancient as WWII.
If you have access to them, butterbeans also seem to show up on most holiday tables. They are fresh tomatoes, rare and valuable when you don’t have a garden. If freezers have one package left, they go on the holiday table.
Presents are part of the holiday celebration, but entirely secondary to the foods/ entertainment aspect of the holiday. In fact, as we age, many of us treasure food as a suitable gift. My aunt told me that when a person reaches 60, there is a good rule to follow in gift giving, “If you can’t eat it, can’t wear it, and can’t spend it – don’t give it.”
Foods are the first in order with that rule. My requests for gifts include pound cakes from my relatives who are good cake bakers. I have learned to make peppermint bark for gifts this year. One of my friends makes wonderful fruitcake cookies that I look forward to receiving. One of everybody’s favorite gifts is a quart of shelle4 picked out pecans. We consider pecans to be the nut of choice in rural southwest Alabama. Now that Christmas comes every three months, we have plenty of them in a good crop year. May this be a good crop year for all of you whether in rural southwest Alabama or the world at large. Christmas is now. Merry Christmas!